‘Miss Abbott, would you mind telling us where you were in the early hours of Sunday morning?’
‘Excuse me?’ she said as colour flooded her face.
‘And where were you on Monday evening?’
‘You can’t ask me—’
‘And for a full set, where were you on Wednesday night?’
The smile on her face was a distant memory.
Bryant took out his notepad and pen. This enraged her even further.
‘There’s no way I’m going—’
‘She was with me,’ Charles said, giving her shoulders a squeeze.
‘All three times?’ Kim asked.
He nodded.
‘All evenings?’ Bryant said. ‘I’m sure that’s something we can check with your wife.’
The colour dropped from his face as Kim’s phone began to ring.
She moved away from the desk.
‘Go ahead, Stace.’
‘Got a minute, boss? We think we might have found something.’
SIXTY-NINE
Kim couldn’t step out of the Exodus offices quickly enough. Despite spending most of her day dealing with killers, thieves and other reprehensible characters, she rarely met anyone as despicable and repugnant as Lorraine Abbott.
She took a good deep breath of air outside.
‘Okay, Stace, go ahead,’ Kim said as Bryant joined her.
‘We’ve got a link, boss, between Liam Sachs and Sarah Laing. Both were messaging someone called Jackal.’
‘Through a dating app?’ Kim asked, wondering what kind of name that was.
‘Starts that way by the looks of it and then goes to phone messaging. No phone calls, just texts. Pretty raunchy and suggestive approach with Sarah.’
‘Go on,’ Kim said, feeling the tingle in her belly that they finally had a link between two of their victims.
‘Jackal suggested to Sarah that the two of them meet at Norton Covert. They must have gone back to her flat afterwards.’
Of course – the Woodland Trust site was just a stone’s throw from her home.
‘And Liam?’
‘Same. It was suggested to him that they meet in the woods by his home. The messages between the two suggest it was just going to be a sexual encounter.’
‘Our killer seems to know enough about our victims to be able to suggest a place that’s off the beaten track and remote enough so they won’t be seen. And yet there was no evidence of sex noted during Liam’s post-mortem,’ Kim said.
Keats’s report had reached her about an hour ago.